My server's back!
As all three of you noticed, my server died last Wednesday. It’s a User Mode Linux server, and my trusty nightly rsync backup script sorta stopped working back in November 2004, so when the server disappeared, yeah, I lost some data.
Fortunately, November 2004 was just before my son was born, so blog entries dropped off dramatically around then, and there wasn’t a lot to reconstruct. I got help from several sources:
- Bloglines caches blogs in a format that’s pretty faithful to the original. I was able to save their Javascript page, fiddle with it a little, then view the result in my browser. Then I copied the HTML into an HTML editor, and that was close enough to the original content.
- For metadata like timestamps, I asked around and luckily a few friends had RSS and Atom feeds left over on their computers. It helps to know people working at a company developing blog software. :) Thanks, Antony and Erik!
- Google Desktop Search’s web history helped with some HTML recovery.
I was able to get all but about five late-2004 items perfectly recovered. Apologies in advance when those show up, incorrectly, as “updated” in your aggregator.
Oh, and by the way, I’m now hosted at Linode. No comment yet on their reliability, but their configuration pages are quite nice. I look forward to the commercialization of Xen; I suspect you get more bang for the buck than UML.
Update: For some reason my registrar decided to switch my domain to their parked host webserver, so anyone visiting sees a “coming soon!” page instead of mine. I believe I fixed the problem two hours ago, but their nameservers are still serving the incorrect address. What good is a 60-minute TTL if you can’t get your changes published more quickly than that?